Making London a National Park City

Dan Raven Ellison is coming to visit us in September. Here he is talking about his idea of making London a National Park City.

Google Expeditions

We're going to be visited by the Google Expeditions team in the 2nd week of the new school year. Professor Shailey Minocha will be bringing all the gear for us to try out some VR Expeditions experiences.

Google Expeditions (GEs)  are guided tours (field trips) of places that students experience on a smartphone through a virtual reality viewer called Google cardboard. 
GEs are comprised of virtual reality panoramas and are led by a guide or teacher. 
Using a Tablet, teachers can guide up to 50 students wearing the virtual reality (VR) viewers and point out highlights while referring to editable notes.

We will be helping with their research.


The focus of this Google-funded project is to investigate the pedagogical effectiveness of GEs, in biology and geography fieldwork – subjects that have a long tradition of physical fieldwork.

The project aims to answer questions such as: whether virtual field trips can be used effectively to support the teaching and demonstration of fieldwork skills such as experimental design, ecological sampling, recording and analysis of data?; can a VR experience enhance physical fieldwork?; can VR-based field trips support self-directed inquiry-based learning and higher-order thinking?; and what are the perceived barriers, if any, for adoption of VR-based field trips?

The key outcomes from this project will be: evidence-based understanding of whether and how VR-based GEs can complement physical field trips and enable learning and teaching of fieldwork skills; how virtual field trips (VFTs) in VR environments should be designed for their effective use in learning and teaching fieldwork and in CPD; and whether and how VR-based GEs can support a variety of pedagogies. The project will come up with recommendations for the content, and user interface and service designs of VR-based VFTs such as GEs.

Just part of the exciting extra opportunities for King's Ely geographers in the new academic year.

New Lego minifigures

We're looking forward to getting our hands on these new series figures: an Antarctic tourist with Penguin, and a walker with map and compass - great stuff!
At King's Ely we love Lego :)

A visit from Dan Raven Ellison

We are going to be visited by National Geographic Explorer Dan Raven Ellison at the start of the new academic year.
He is currently walking across all the cities and National Parks in the UK, and we will be walking across ELY as part of this project.

Just part of the exciting extra opportunities for King's Ely geographers in the new academic year.

Microclimate Weather Station

We will be using these in the new academic year.

Did I make the most disco (discoest?) bird-faced weather station ever? Yes. Yes I did. #maker #weather @DoItKits pic.twitter.com/ffKrU32Cie

— helenleigh (@helenleigh) July 28, 2016

Just part of the exciting extra opportunities for King's Ely geographers in the new academic year.

Teachmeet RGS - 9th November

There are only a few tickets left for the 2nd Teachmeet to be held at the Royal Geographical Society.
As I have some free time on Wednesday afternoons in my timetable next year, I was able to make the date this time round, and have also signed up to present at the event.
It's the week after the Practical Pedagogies event in Toulouse, so I will be sharing a slimmed down version of my presentation there, on the Power of Geographical Information.

Mission:Explore National Parks - now out...

Members of QP will remember the part they played in the development of the latest Mission:Explore book, which is published in association with National Parks.

There's an excellent Ordnance Survey Blog post here which says a lot of nice things about our Mission:Explore National Parks book. It also features a short video with Steve Backshall.



The Mission:Explore team compiled the book after putting a huge selection of challenges to the vote by schoolchildren, with the favourites selected to be published.

It’s the seventh book the Mission:Explore team have released, since winning the Geovation Challenge in 2010, when they wowed the team with their exciting ideas using geography. If you haven’t come across them before, the project encourages people, and especially children, to see, explore and act in new ways.
Mission:Explore founders saw the subject of geography being marginalised, and in schools and neighbourhoods children’s physical geographies being reduced due to risk aversion. And they wanted to change that.

Rio Olympics - the BBC trailer

The BBC trailer for their Rio Olympics coverage places a lot of emphasis on the wildlife of the Amazon… How relevant is that to the urban locations for the games? Is Brazil defined by the Amazon? Are some of these animals threatened by habitat change? Some interesting discussions to be had…

Ocean Plastics story

A nice story from the very useful A View to Sea blog, which is written by Holly Griffin, a geography graduate.

It's about Ocean Sole: a company that makes sculptures from ocean plastics. They make a range of items

As a bizarre and yet very real phenomenon, thousands and thousands of flipflops are washed up onto the East African coast creating an environmental disaster. Not only spoiling the natural beauty of our beaches and oceans, the rubber soles are swallowed & suffocated on by fish & other animals, they obstruct turtle hatchlings from reaching the sea and are a man-made menace to our fragile ecosystems. 

Our creative team of artisans transforms the discarded flipflops into elephants, giraffes, lions, rhinos, dolphins, sharks, turtles and more. These colourful masterpieces come with an important message about marine conservation whilst bringing smiles to people all over the world.

Have a great summer!

See you in a month or so...
Thanks for reading...

Look forward to being back here next week...